It’s not really hypothetical at this point, though – CGC has captured a certain amount of market share. PSA has graded somewhere around 7m Pokemon cards and CGC has graded 2.3m. That’s a non-trivial portion of the market, and they’re still grading 50k-100k Pokemon cards a month, even with PSA open:
This isn’t to say that CGC is going to ever rival PSA – just that PSA doesn’t have a total monopoly on the grading market. For resale purposes, PSA is undoubtedly the superior option right now. Which makes it that much more interesting that CGC is still doing a sizable volume of business, and indicates that people don’t universally view PSA as a superior option (for non-resale purposes).
Yeah the volume is there for sure. I was mostly just talking about value of collections because I cant speak to what each individual submitter thinks when and where they submit. I have my skepticism on a lot of the grading that has been happening for the past few years (for all companies) like most people do and have personally started to view a massively large portion of it as inorganic and unsustainable
Oh yeah, I totally agree with that perspective on grading in general. Way too many cards are being graded (regardless of company). The best evidence of this is the stunning price erosion in the relative value of graded and raw cards. Raw NM-M exs and 1st Ed WotC holos are regularly selling for higher than PSA/CGC/BGS 9 prices – because, simply put, too many of these cards were put into slabs. Raw collectors who are picky about condition basically have no other option than to crack 8s and 9s at this point, which is just a symptom of the (ongoing, to an extent) grading mania.
It is scary to see. Obviously this is a bit removed from the topic of this post since it looks like it would just effect the highest end BGS slabs which generally wouldnt be at much risk of price erosion.
The raw vs graded differences in cards these days is astonishing to me. It makes sense I guess, but still quite jarring.
I’m fully willing and even hopeful to submit to the idea that many grading companies can coexist (Id happily swap everything I have to some new company if they just had a decent label/case combo), but I legitimately fear for the future of grading in pokemon. It is quite possible that grading, not overprinting/reprinting, kills some aspects of pokemon’s value as the reprinting did for sports cards
Its not that I hate them or anything. Its simply my view that their grading is the worst of the 3. I’m sure they are nice people but these decisions are well let’s say I’m not the only one…
I do wonder how this will affect the MTG grading scene… I’ve seen more and more MTG in CGC slabs, which I am happy to see. We’ll see if this pushes MTG collectors toward BGS, CGC, or binders.
An absolute master stroke move by cgc I’d love to meet their strategist. My brothers pokemon and flesh and blood. He’s got cards in at bgs with flesh and blood. Looking forward to what he has to say. He’s got some of my flesh and blood major pulls in the sub aswell as we’ve gone halves on boxes sometimes just for the fun of something else for me but to him he loves it. I guess I have a vested interest in bgs lol.
The backlash is omg. I’ve just looked through the messages on their IG. Crisis talks are happening right now for sure. Months and months and months love that bit.
